A "Summery" of the Garden

Here are some updated pictures of the garden!

The beans in the new bed in front of the house (I'm not sure what possessed me to want to plant more beans!!)

The potatoes (they're really small, I know. The soil has some deficiencies, but we'll work on building it up)

Romaine lettuce, yellow zucchini, volunteer zucchini and pole beans

Swiss chard! I planted a variety called "bright lights" and it's very pretty, with yellow, red, pink, purple and green stems/veins on the various plants.

 Onions, marigolds and beets

Basil and onions

Carrots and tomatoes!

Peppers and cukes (LOTS of cukes!)

 The new bed in back (we put a row cover on it for a little while) with kale and lettuce

 I tried sun-drying some kale to make kale chips. It worked pretty well until it started getting windy and blowing the dried kale away! I had to finish them in the dehydrator.

 It's an apple. It's an alien. It's kohlrabi!

The lettuce out back

This tomato looks like three growing together!

 Spinach (I'm surprised that this spinach actually grew over the summer! I guess it was cool enough for it up here)

I'm currently harvesting cucumbers every day, and yellow zucchini every other day or so. The beans are slowing down a bit, thankfully (since we have PLENTY of them already!). We have enough lettuce for us to eat about 10 salads per day...  most of the broccoli is in and processed, along with the cauliflower... what else. Oh yeah! We made our first batch of basil pesto! It is SOOO delicious. I should pick more of that soon. Anyways... let's just say I'm almost a vegetarian these days. :-) I even brought in a head of cabbage yesterday. That is significant because I thought that the cabbages were goners due to the out-of-control cabbage worms.

I'm happy that our garden this year has been very rewarding. We are greatly blessed with lots of produce!!

My Week in a Few Words - 8/4/11

Traveling. Hotel. Bible. Tired. Buckit week. Prayer. Fellowship. People. Games. Evangelism. Parables. Learning. Notes. Cults. Church.  Plans. Sitting. Sessions. Food. Tea. E-Sword. Sunshine. Fun. Ideas. Ish.

AEDs, ankles and irony

I'll be honest. Until Saturday, I didn't even know what an AED was. Now I have an adult AED certification. Scary, huh? :-)

In case you are wondering, AED stands for automated external defibrillator (say that three times fast!). It's basically an electronic device meant for shocking an abnormal heartbeat to get it back in a normal rhythm. My Mom and I took a first aid/CPR/AED course Saturday. Ever since I was younger, one of my favorite books to read was the American Red Cross first aid book that my Dad brought home from his work one day. I now have the updated version!

The hardest part of the course was putting the mannequins together. I think a good part of the beginning of the class should have covered that necessary detail. :-) I put the plastic bag "lung" inside my adult mnqn and the poor guy STILL didn't breath, no matter how much CPR I did on him. I think he had a hole in his lung. :-(

Anyways, it was a good class, and the Red Cross first aid book that the teacher gave us has a lot of good information in it.

Now here's the irony. Shortly after I got home, I was going outside to water the newly-planted snap bush beans, and as I stepped off of the landscape tie onto the driveway my right ankle decided to turn. My first thought was: ouch. My second thought was: This is ironic! I get home from a first-aid class and the first thing I do is sprain my ankle. Great! :-)

Garden greens

Nothing like a fresh-picked mesclun salad...

...with garlic scapes and homemade lettuce/scape pesto!

What's in the Garden?

I said that I would post pictures of the garden, so here they are!

The potatoes (the garlic is just past them)

The black seeded Simpson lettuce

Mesclun and more Simpson lettuce

The rather anemic-looking summer squashes (the soil needs more nitrogen in general)

Eggplant

Pole beans!

Romaine lettuce (some of which we already harvested)

Cabbage...

 

Onions and broccoli

The beets that mysteriously sprung up that I never actually planted right there...

Carrots!

Tomatoes and peppers (with radishes sprinkled in)

Pole beans (cucumbers are down at the end under the trellises)

Sad-looking sweet potato vines... :(

Snap peas

The basil bed

More onions!

More broccoli! (We have cauliflower growing, too)

And the garlic again!

We also got some strawberries from the farm, which will hopefully produce next year.

I am looking forward to raspberries! There are lots of plants growing in the woods in our backyard. I've already seen some tiny green berries.

We are being inundated with lettuce! It's nice being able to have salad for every meal, though! Some friends of ours are juicing theirs, they're getting so much. :-) We are going to attempt to make pesto out of garlic scapes and lettuce. Has anybody out there ever tried it?

My week in a few Words

When I don't have much time to write a full-blown post but I still want to update the blog, I may occasionally write a post that just summarizes what I've been up to lately. Stay tuned for posts expounding on the details!

Summer. Biking. Gardening. Friends. Church. Bible studies. Studying. Prayer. Birthdays. Volleyball. CYIA. CEF. Camp. Packing. Last minute. Clothes. Bonfire. Goji berries. Cocoa nibs. Sunshine. Enjoyment. Scripture.

How would you describe your week in a few words?

30-Day Bible Challenge

In May I attended a day-long conference geared toward equipping and encouraging young people to share the gospel. While I was there, one of the speakers gave a challenge: For 30 consecutive days, read 2 Bible verses in the morning and evening, and meditate on what you read. I read the Bible each day anyway, but I still decided to take the challenge, and along with meditating on what I read, write down some of my thought about the various passages.

Even from day 1 I felt encouraged and refreshed by the Word of God all over again! I think that actually writing down the things I learned about the verses that I read really gave me the desire to explore them further and dig deeper into the truths that they contained. Certain things just seemed to "click" as I pondered the verses, how they applied to me, and how I should live in light of them. Just goes to show that the Bible is a living book, and you can never fully plumb its depths!

So here's the challenge.
For 30 days, read 2 Bible verses (it can be more!) in the morning and in the evening, meditate (think about) what you read, and jot down some of your thoughts about the verses. I hope you take the challenge, and if you don't already read your Bible daily then I hope you make it a habit!


If you decide to take the challenge, then please comment! Also, if you want to share any of the thoughts that the Lord brings to your mind along the way, then feel free. I would love to share some of thoughts He's blessed me with.

Waiting... but not for long!

Today was just too beautiful for words, so here are some photos!

(pardon the black spot in the upper right-hand corner of these photos... our poor little camera has suffered a lot of abuse! I suppose you could consider it a watermark... :-)

Here's the garden, waiting to be tilled and planted planted. Kale, Swiss chard, broccoli, bell peppers, onions, green beans, snap peas, carrots, potatoes, cabbage, zucchini and squash are some of the things we want to plant, in addition to the garlic, which took up residence last October. We already have peppers, onions and tomatoes started in little pots.

Here's the bonfire, waiting to be lit! Most of this brush came from the woods where Dad wants to put in another garden plot. The spot we have our current garden gets a bit wet, since it's in a lower elevation. We'll still use it this year, but we're hoping to have the other garden up and running next year.

Speaking of which, here is the site of garden 2.0.12! It doesn't look like much yet, but with a little (lot) of work, hopefully it will work out well for another garden spot.

Here's part of our lawn, waiting to be mowed! It's so refreshing looking out of the window and seeing GREEN instead of WHITE on the ground. Though I'm sure when summer comes I'll wish we had a little of that white stuff. :-)

Here's the recently-pruned lilac bush, waiting for flowers!

Here's the trusty weather station that never needs to wait for weather!

You can actually view the data from it here!

Here's one of the first few flowers in our flowerbeds, waiting for company.

They do say that two is company...

Speaking of which, Tucker kept me company on my photo expedition around the yard.

But he really doesn't like the sound the camera makes when you click the "shudder" button! :-)

So, there you have it! Spring at Green Gambrels.